When the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs awarded a five-year contract to Flow Health for advancing artificial intelligence, the startup stepped into the national health IT spotlight. Healthcare IT News caught up with Flow Health CEO Alex Mishkin to discuss his vision for AI, cognitive computing and machine learning, what a federal contract means to a young company and what the incoming Trump administration might mean for innovation in America. Q: What does winning a VA contract mean to an emerging company like Flow Health? A: The VA approached us and said'imagine what you can help us do with our data.' It's super exciting to be working with the largest integrated clinical data set in the United States: 22 million unique people, spanning 20 years so it's a rich longitudinal data.

Earlier this week we warned that as the trend to robotization accelerates, millions of (mostly) low-skilled American jobs will be lost in the next five years, replaced by robots as companies seek to maintain high profit margins in a time of rising wages and growing inflation. One company, however, can not wait that long. British outsourcing giant Capita, a company whose contracts include collecting the BBC license fee, is preparing to fire thousands and replace them with robots after clients cut spending following Brexit vote in a move some fear will be repeated across the country, leading to more than 1 million job losses according to the Guardian. Capita, a FTSE 100-listed firm that also runs the London congestion charge, said it needed to axe 2,000 jobs as part of a cost-cutting drive in response to poor trading. The company said it would use the money it saved to fund investment into robotic workers across the whole company.

You can hardly blame Michigan for trying to scarf down its piece of pie before someone swipes it off their plate. The Wolverine State just became one of the first in the country to formally give the thumbs-up to autonomous cars on public roads, with no driver in the front seat. Friday, Governor Rick Snyder put his signature on bills permitting automakers to operate networks of self-driving taxis in the state.1 The legislation reverses a 2013 law that required autonomous vehicles to have a backup driver aboard, and comes as the home teams move toward delivering the tech for real. Ford has pledged to deliver fleets of fully autonomous cars, without a steering wheel or pedals, by 2021.

From spray-on skin for burns victims, the electronic pacemaker, the Gardasil and Cervarix cancer vaccines, or finding the medical application of penicillin, Australia has a reputation of birthing a number of medical innovations that have changed the global healthcare industry. In 1967, Sydney-based Dr Graeme Clark began researching the possibilities of an electronic implantable hearing device, and by 1978, the first ever Cochlear implant was performed. Cochlear then celebrated its 10,000 recipient in 1994 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) a year later. Since then, Cochlear has performed thousands of operations and switched on the sound for those previously living in silence. It has also built an impressive global presence, but with that comes dealing with the way different countries and jurisdictions want information stored.

The query was raised via an on-screen prompt following the confusing Season 1 finale of HBO's "Westworld." Perplexed viewers were then directed to a website where they could get some answers. But that question has also been ruminating in our collective consciousness since Nov. 8 when Donald Trump's victory marked the biggest upset in the history of presidential elections, after one of the most uncivilized campaign slogs in modern memory. Unfortunately, there is no explainer website to clear things up. Both events offered surprise endings and more dispiriting parallels than were probably good for our threadbare attention spans. "Westworld" started as a sci-fi drama set in a Wild West-style theme park when it debuted in October, where robot hosts fulfilled the fantasies of human guests and, ultimately, it was humanity that took a vacation.

All of it coming at you day and night in a never-ending stream that moves so fast that it becomes a screaming blur that makes you want to bang your head against a brick wall until the lost consciousness finally silences the machine and provides you with some degree of sanctuary from the madness. With this in mind, it seems clear that Americans are suffering from information overload, right? Well, according to the latest Pew numbers, only 20 percent of us feel overloaded by the glut of information we encounter on a continual basis. And that surprisingly low number is actually down pretty dramatically from a decade ago. The NextDraft newsletter is now on WIRED.com.

IBM Watson may be able to win "Jeopardy!" The IBM Watson for Cybersecurity beta program launched this week with 40 partners around the world in an effort to help security analysts make better, faster decisions from vast amounts of data, but experts say this is the same promise offered by many other products. IBM said Watson for Cybersecurity will feature natural language processing that can help it to "understand the unique language of security." "The truth is a lot of security vendors today are attaching '[artificial intelligence]' or'cognitive' to a number of products that are really just advanced analytics or machine learning, which are also important elements that can help in the fight against cybercrime," Diana Kelley, executive security advisor for IBM Security, told SearchSecurity. "What Watson will bring to the equation that is unique is the ability to digest vast amounts of both structured data as well as all of the intelligence that exists in natural language, like blogs, white papers and research reports. For example, there are around 10,000 security research papers published each year, and 60,000 security blog posts published every month."

Oxford University researchers have estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated within the next two decades. With everything from Amazon Go's cashierless stores to automated customer service to robo-advisors and driverless cars, we are moving toward a world with more productivity and fewer jobs. As many have commented, this is very reminiscent of globalization and outsourcing. But, with outsourcing, we only did half the work -- we struck trade deals around the world and increased productivity and corporate profits, but forgot to help retrain the work force to land jobs in the new economy. The result was an entire population left behind, and populist reactions like Brexit and Trump.

The governor of Michigan signed a legislative package Friday that allows cars without steering wheels or drivers to be tested on the state's highways. The plan is to make the state "the epicenter for driverless vehicle technology," said Gov. Rick Snyder. Florida already allows testing of completely driverless cars. With the new law, Michigan and Florida now are the most liberal states on laws governing driverless car technology. The bills drew strong bipartisan support as Michigan, the home of the U.S. auto industry, attempts to establish itself as a leader in driverless technology.

Fast food executive Andrew Puzder, who President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap as labor secretary, has advocated replacing some human workers with machines as a way for businesses to reduce costs associated with rising wages and health-care expenses. While machines require regular maintenance and can sometimes malfunction, Puzder said, they are also easier to manage than humans and don't pose the same legal risks. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," Puzder told Business Insider in March. Puzder serves as the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporate parent behind fast food chains Hardee's and Carl's Jr. The company counts 3,300 locations in 42 states and 28 countries, according to its website.